You know not what you say

People really don't think about what they say, do they?

(Wow, this is going to take a lot of background before I can even begin to explain what someone said tonight that hit me so wrong. I guess I better get started.)

The Setting 

You know that I attend a Buddhist Sangha once a week, practicing in the Plum Village Tradition of Thích Nhất Hạnh (or "Thầy" for short) and affiliated with a local Unitarian Church. (I have regularly called it "the UU Sangha" and I wrote about it recently here.) Typically we practice sitting meditation, a little walking meditation, and then we read a text or watch a video and discuss it for dharma study. 

For the past several months, we have been reading Thay's book Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals 1962–1966. It's a good book in a number of ways, among them that it shows what Thay was like when he was a young monk, before he had acquired the aura of the World-Famous Great Teacher that surrounded him for much of his life. Tonight's reading finished the next-to-last chapter, and included the following story by Thay.

Last year I went to the British Museum. I was fascinated by the preserved remains of a human body buried five thousand years ago.... Every detail of the man's body had been preserved. I could see strands of hair, his ankles, each intact finger and toe. He had been buried in that position five thousand years ago in the desert. The heat of the sands had dried and preserved his body.... A little girl, about eight years old, stood beside me and asked in a worried voice, "Will that happen to me?"

I trembled and looked at this tender flower of humanity, this vulnerable child without any means to defend herself, and I said, "No, this will never happen to you." Having comforted her, I walked with her into a different room. I lied about something that Chandaka, the Buddha's charioteer, never lied about to Siddhartha.* [If you don't know the story of Siddhartha and his charioteer, you can find it here.] 

The Remark

After we finished our reading, we discussed it. One of our newer members—he joined just a few months ago—is a retired UU minister. I guess for now I'll call him The Reverend. He had already delivered himself of a short speech when we were all checking in, about the bombing of Iran on March 1. He explained that he opposed bombing other countries and that he considered his role now to be one of public opposition and activism.** When we came to discuss the reading, the Reverend immediately referred back to the story of Thay comforting the little girl in the British Museum. Then he said, "I want to take this as the text that I live by, from here going forward." He talked about how Thay spent so much time around small children: helping them, supporting them, comforting them, and encouraging them to see the beauty and the love in the world. And he concluded by quoting the very end of this chapter (a few pages later), where Thay writes:

I want to tell Steve not to worry about a thing. Tomorrow when peace returns to Vietnam, he will be able to visit Phuong Boi. Phuong Boi taught us what this love is, and Phuong Boi will share it with Steve in the language of wildflowers and grasses.... Flowers don't know how to hate. We will return to the circle of life as flowers, grasses, birds, or clouds to bring people the message of eternal love. Like the village children who, even in this time of war, sing:

"We will love others forever and ever, hand holding hand. We will love others forever."***

As the discussion progressed, many people said they found the Reverend's words inspiring. 

Clever girl

Ma Schmidt is getting wily about avoiding the anxiety medication. This afternoon I crushed one into a spoon of ice cream, and another into a spoon of jam. She rejected both of them. In fact, that's what triggered her fighting us so violently. 

Later in the early evening, Schmidt got her to take one pill by telling her it was heart medicine. Then he crushed two more into a little water and put it in a syringe that he squirted into her mouth. This is the protocol he uses to give medicine to his cats.

I think it works better on cats. He got the syringe squirted into her mouth, but then she just kept stock still. We tried to make her swallow some water, but she spilled the water and kept the liquid with the medicine under her tongue. A few minutes later, she spit out that too. Schmidt thinks that some of it may have been absorbed through the skin inside her mouth while it was sitting under her tongue, because she fell asleep not long after. But she is getting wily.

The thing is, at some level (perhaps not fully consciously) she can probably tell that we are being dishonest with her.

She says "Help me!" and we tell her she's safe. But she means "Don't let me die," and we mean "Of course you're going to die."

She is worried about what's coming, and we tell her not to worry. But she's trying to tell us that she's worried she might die, and what we mean is, "Don't worry, you can go ahead and die safely."

We give her anti-anxiety medication to calm her down, but we never tell her why. Or at any rate we never tell her the full truth about why—namely, that as she is slowly dying she is also becoming more irrational and less tethered to reality, and we want her to feel at peace partly for her own sake but especially for ours.

No wonder she thinks we are trying to kill her!

She asks for her husband, Pa Schmidt—or her mother—and we don't tell her where they are. Admittedly, Schmidt did tell his mother once that Pa had died seventeen years ago, and she got very upset. But that's why neither of us will tell her again. Yes, partly we don't want to inflict more emotional pain on her; but also we are managing our own emotional comfort, and it is simply more comfortable to lie to her or to deflect her questions. So that's what we do.

And she doesn't know WHY we are doing it, but I bet that at an emotional level she can absolutely tell that we are doing it! So why should she trust us?

      

On lying, part 12

So it appears that Nature published an article a couple weeks ago under the title, "Deception is associated with reduced social connection." (You can download a PDF of the article here.) The conclusion includes such gems as:

"Our findings suggest that learning to engage in honest conversations—even when they may be difficult or uncomfortable—may provide an avenue for improving social relationships and well-being, more generally."

"Dishonesty, it seems, is detrimental to the sender’s well-being—breeding distrust and diminishing social connection."

"Findings underscore the consequences of deception in social life, even when undetected, and provide support for the old adage that honesty is the best policy."

It even comes with charts.

Well it's certainly nice to know. I'm pretty sure this is what I was trying to tell Wife for years. "Dishonesty … is detrimental to the sender's well-being"? Yup. I discussed that here. (Well, and for example here too, and other places.) "Honest conversations—even when … difficult or uncomfortable—may … [improve] social relationships"? That's exactly what I was saying here. And I'm pretty sure Plato and Aristotle got to the same conclusion long before I did.

In other breaking news, the best bait for mice is cheese.

          

Pro tip from Twitter

I'm pretty sure when Scott Adams posted this he meant it as a political remark. Given what's been in the news lately, it probably has to do with the allegations of bribery against President Biden. But it caught my attention because this was always and consistently my experience with Wife! With her affairs. With everything else. This was always her go-to defense.

Or else she'd ask me what evidence I had. Then she'd give me a carefully-tailored alibi to account for exactly that evidence. After a while I caught on to the game, and stopped answering her questions. This made her accuse me of jumping to conclusions unfairly, but it was easier than playing the game over and over.

On the one hand, it was exhausting. On the other hand, I know Adams is right about what he says here.

          

Blast from the past: Boyfriend 1 aftermath (B1. part 3)

We never had another day as glorious as that first one. Wife continued to be married to me. (In fact, Boyfriend 1's older brother warned him, "If you love this woman encourage her to stay with her husband. Otherwise you will set up a pattern for her of leaving whenever things get tough.") But from time to time she continued to see Boyfriend 1. Sometimes he would visit us. Sometimes she would visit him. Mostly Wife was shy and embarrassed at letting one of us see her fucking the other one, so she tried hard to devolve the threesome into two twosomes. Ironically, this was the wrong choice on her part. What I found, speaking purely for myself, was this: 

If there was a closed door—or thirty miles of freeway—between me and some place that Wife was having sex, I felt insanely jealous. But if she was having sex with someone else right there directly in front of me, I felt fine because I figured that it would be my turn in a few minutes.

I don't know if anyone else in the world feels this way, but I bet they do. I assume I'm not so unusual as all that. But this means that, ironically, Wife's shyness and embarrassment led to maximal levels of jealousy on my part … and probably on his as well.

On lying, part 11

This is the body of an email I wrote to Marie some four years ago. Recently I ran across a note to myself to post it here. The note doesn't say whether I wanted to expand on it, and I no longer recall what I was thinking at the time. So let me just present it as-is. Some of this may cover familiar ground, but some of it may be new.

The context is that I had been discussing aspects of my (past) relationship with D, and Marie had fixated on my remarks that D was a remarkably gifted liar when she needed to be. This led her to make some assumptions (based on the only other gifted liars she had ever known in her life) which I was at some pains to dispel. Anyway, my discussion went something like this. 

――――――――――

As for my descriptions of D generally, please bear in mind that they are all oversimplifications. Any real person is necessarily more complex than the best description. And there are a lot of ways that she resembled Wife. (Also a lot in which she differed hugely.) For the moment, just as a placeholder, let me say that the resemblance I had in mind in my poem was connected to her inability to hear me during certain kinds of conversations. For my part I had not learned to speak very clearly yet, and this needs a lot more paragraphs before it will be anywhere near the truth. But maybe it can stand for now until we can come back to it.

On the subject of lying, I want to say several things. And even all these will probably oversimplify, but maybe they can point in the direction of a better understanding.

On the one hand, I am well aware that lies corrode the soul. I spent many hours, over the years, trying to make Wife see that. And I think “Women and Honor” is brilliant and deep. If I spend very little time right now on these topics — on Rich and Aristotle and the virtue-side of the question — it’s not because I am unaware of them, nor because I disagree with them, nor yet because I think they are unimportant. It is more that I think I can take them for granted when I talk to you, so I don’t need to reiterate them. In a sense I assume them as prerequisites for any further discussion. You don’t spend a lot of time on algebra when studying calculus, but without algebra you are lost; and I would not trust my further thoughts with anybody that I did not first trust to get this part.

That having been said, ... well, let me tell you a story.

Back in 2009, things were getting pretty bad between me and Wife. I didn’t move out for another four years, but I made the decision that things were unsalvageable. Wife, for her part, seemed to get ever more erratic and desperate. And one weekend, when we drove down to visit my parents, she packed her handgun into her travel bag. She had bought it back when I was spending the weeks working in [a town far away] and she was afraid to be alone in the apartment. Since then she would go target shooting once every 5-10 years, but otherwise never used it. 

God only knows why she brought it along on this trip. When I asked her later, she couldn’t tell me. So I concluded, rightly or wrongly, that her behavior had become sufficiently unpredictable that it was no longer safe to trust her with lethal force. I stole the handgun from her and hid it. Of course she knew who had taken it, and I never denied that part. And when she first asked where it was, I said I wouldn’t tell her. But Wife can be remarkably persistent; so after the umpteenth time she demanded to know its location, I gave her answers designed to get her to stop asking but also to prevent her from ever really finding the weapon. 

Does that make me a liar? I suppose it does. It also makes me alive. True, if you look at the story statistically the odds are probably against her ever actually killing me. But I don’t feel too bad about helping the statistics along. When the stakes are life and death, it’s nice to avoid needless risks. 

Was I a convincing liar? I had to be convincing, so I was. To this day she has never found the handgun. Could I be convincing again some time in the future if the stakes were lower? I don’t know. I hope never to have to put it to the test. 

Did my convincing-ness come from 10,000 hours of practice? No. Absolutely not.

Anyway, the fact remains that after all my speeches to Wife about how lying corrodes the soul, I lied to her to prevent her putting her hands on a lethal weapon to which she had — still has — valid legal title. And even though I totally believe everything I say above about the virtue of telling the truth — in other words, this has nothing to do with simple hypocrisy — I would do it again if I had to, if I thought that it would avert the murder of myself or someone I love. 

Therefore perhaps what we need is a new theory, a wider theory — one that does not contradict the virtue-talk I reference above, but which extends it somehow. Perhaps it includes the former theory as a special or limiting case, or something like that.

―――――

There is an easy way to evade the issue, but it’s one I reject. The easy answer says, “When you misled Wife about her gun, that wasn’t a lie so much as an exception. Consider even something like homicide. If a mugger threatens to kill you and you kill him first in provable self-defense, no court in the country will convict you. So this was self-defense and that makes it OK.”

Except it’s not. Yes, under certain circumstances you can do things that are normally forbidden and get away with them. But that’s just because we as a society have made certain conventional agreements about what behavior we will prosecute. It says nothing about the reality of the act itself. If lying corrodes the soul, then it corrodes the soul even if you have an excuse. Using the example of homicide that the objector in the previous paragraph bounced through so chirpily, killing another human being takes a toll on one. Even if you kill a mugger in self-defense — hell, even if you save the lives of a dozen innocents by taking out the villain who was holding them hostage — you will carry the burden of that death for the rest of your days. It may have been the best thing you could do under the bad circumstances, but that doesn’t make it free or easy. Or if you hate your enemies, the hatred will poison you just as surely, whether your enemies are immigrants or Klansmen, the Amish or the Gestapo. Each of these things — the lie, the killing, the hatred — costs. Each of them takes something from you. The fact that other people will congratulate you this time while blaming you that time is entirely irrelevant.

Where does that leave me, then? It’s a little late for me to aspire to a life of perfect sinlessness — that cherry has already been popped. And I’m not sure that it’s actually the best choice: what if you are confronted with one of the awful dilemmas we were just talking about that look like extenuations? But let me go back to this idea of cost. It’s always a bad idea to incur costs heedlessly, of any kind. And as the soul is more valuable than the wallet, it’s prudent to be even more cautious of costs to the soul than of costs to the wallet. But it costs something to buy groceries, yet we do it. It costs something to go to work every day, yet we do it. Is this cost really that different? Or is it, too, something we can choose to pay under certain circumstances, when it is worth it — doing wrong while knowing we are doing wrong and choosing it anyway for reasons we think sufficient?

“We think sufficient.” There is an unavoidable element of subjective judgement here. We might be wrong. So it behooves us not to be flippant about it. But this subjective element also makes it harder to judge someone else. If I look at D, say, it costs me nothing to congratulate myself that I would never lie about this or that. But how can I really see the pressures on her without standing in her shoes? Since I can never stand in her shoes, is it not maybe the kinder path to back off?

This does not mean ignoring things that truly affect you. One reason I can admire D’s technical skill is that I arranged my involvement with her in such a way that it didn’t matter whether the things she said were true or not. Under different terms of engagement it would have mattered more and I would have cared more. But in her case I could afford not to care.

And this is why I think it is important to know someone’s story. It’s not my job to score anyone on a moral checklist. But if I am going to interact with someone I want to know what I can expect. So rather than know X is Good and Y is Bad, I’d like to know that X is reliable with money but don’t offer a drink to Y. If I can choose the Wrong sometimes, when all the options are bad ones, so can the other fellow. But in that case it is most valuable to know how he evaluates bad situations, not merely that he might do Wrong on occasion.

      

Cum clarem, obscuro

(For the Latin-impaired, the title means, "In clarifying, I obscure.")

It's getting strange having this almost-but-not-quite-romantic platonic relationship with Debbie at the same time that I'm in a regular-but-long-distance relationship with Marie. And it has been stranger because Debbie has been in-state while taking care of her mother for the last half year or more.

There was a time some months ago that she had to get away from her mom for a day; so she left her with a daytime caregiver and we met at a botanical garden that was about halfway between the two of us. (Call it a 90-minute drive for each of us, or maybe a little longer.) I made a point to email Marie about that ahead of time, and afterwards told her all about the plants in the garden. (Marie, like Debbie, loves gardening. I'm less excited by it, but I try not to express that opinion too loudly.)

Then last month Debbie's mother finally died. Debbie came to visit her friends here in Beautiful City, and spent the night at my apartment. I told that story briefly here. What I neglected to add was Debbie's remark as we were getting ready for bed. 

We slept on two separate mattresses; but because they are so cumbersome and clumsy to move, we left them in the same room next to each other. And I spread one large blanket over both of us. (My accommodations are a little spartan.) We changed into night clothes in different rooms, and we never touched each other. Also, as I said before, Debbie was sick several times in the night. But as we were working out all these details, Debbie wondered aloud if we should "pull back" a little. She went on to say that she really valued my counsel, and over the last year had even come to rely on it. But she added that of course that came with a significant emotional component too, and she figured Marie would be pretty unhappy about that part if she knew. I reminded her that I always tell Marie when we are going to visit each other, and I always tell her whatever we do. Still, her remark was another step down the "I love you" road.

As an aside, I realize that if I wanted to cast my own actions in the most ungenerous light, I would point out that telling Marie everything we do is always the safest and most innocuous thing I could possibly tell her about my visits with Debbie, because we never do anything at all risky … well, I suppose unless you count sleeping in the same room on adjacent mattresses under the same big comforter. 

And … gosh, come to think of it, when I reported on that visit after it was over, I neglected to mention that part because I thought that Debbie's gastrointestinal bug and her being sick several times in one night were more important. Certainly if there had been any risk of surreptitious sex, her sickness would have prevented it neatly. And that's why I thought it was important to talk about the illness; the illness, in turn, is why I thought it was excusable to neglect the sleeping arrangements. After all, nothing came of them -- nor would have, to be clear, even had she not gotten sick.

But my point was really going to be that if there is ever anything in my visits with Debbie that might concern or disturb Marie, it's never the deeds. It's always the intangibles: what we say to each other, and how it feels. So if you wanted to convict me of lying by telling the truth (or obscuring the matter by clarifying it, hence the title of this post), you could make a case. You wouldn't do that, would you?

Sorry, I got distracted. Where was I? Oh right. Visits with Debbie.

In time, Debbie and her sister made arrangements for their mother's funeral (planning it for a week ago today). When Debbie first mentioned this, she said nothing about my coming, which was OK with me. I had met her mother a few times, but it's not like I was close to the family. In a later conversation, she apologized for failing to invite me, and said of course I was welcome. I replied that there was no need for her to apologize, and that I just assumed she had decided I fell outside the family circle. She said no, she hadn't decided anything; she was just distracted and scatter-brained about the whole experience. But I repeated that I wasn't really part of the family circle, so I didn't need to come.

The day before the funeral -- in mid-afternoon -- she texted me, asking me to come. She mentioned that some other close friends of hers from Beautiful City were also coming, and they had known her mom even less than I did. Please come. So of course I said yes.

Just how well did I know Debbie's mother? I met her the first time not long after Debbie and I started dating; she told me she thought it was God's providence that Debbie and I had gotten together when we did. This opinion clearly embarrassed Debbie a lot, but I was able to agree with her calmly. I was invited to her house once, just for a visit; then I was invited a second time, for Christmas, to open presents. She made sure I had a stocking. (I mention that Christmas ever-so-briefly here.) I don't remember if I visited again after that, but if I was visiting Debbie while she had a video call with her mom, I would move into view long enough to wave and say "Hi!" She always remembered me and she was always gracious to me, regardless how my relationship with her daughter evolved. So it's not like we were strangers. I was prepared to be excluded because I often assume I'm going to be excluded anyway. It just seems natural to me. But we weren't strangers, and she was always gracious and kind to me. I said so to the other people I met at the funeral, for what it is worth. Maybe I wasn't out of place after all. 

This was sudden enough that I never did get around to telling Marie about it. On the other hand I did have time to tell my mother: it was going to take me several hours to drive to the funeral, and it would be a lot quicker afterwards to drive to my mom's house and spend the night there than to drive all the way back home. Also, a funeral isn't really a visit … is it?

Maybe I better say something. You think?

Then this Monday Debbie came to Beautiful City for another funeral -- this time, an old friend of hers whom I never knew. And she wanted to spend a couple days visiting other friends. She stayed in a hotel this time. And we went hiking outside of town. Twice. Tuesday afternoon and all day Wednesday. 

Wednesday's hike was grueling. Clearly I am nowhere near ready for the West Highland Way. But what matters for the purposes of this blog post is a remark Debbie made while we were hiking. She asked about my job hunting, and I admitted I haven't gotten very far. She asked about this or that possible direction to look, and they were things I really hadn't thought about before. Then she said, "The reason I suggested those particular jobs is that you could do them anywhere. And since they are portable, that means you'd be available for a lot more hiking and backpacking. So I have an ulterior motive." 

Oh. Wow. I guess you do. Wait, is this what you meant a month ago when you said, "Maybe we should pull back"?

As I said at the beginning, it is getting strange.

                 

On lying, part 10, continued

The very same day (yesterday) that I read the passage in the preceding post, I read the following paragraph in an article about Joe McCarthy:

Like many bamboozlers who succeed by preying on the earnest and the credulous, McCarthy was easily bamboozled. He often tied witnesses who had little to hide in knots, but the actual spies who testified (and there were one or two) completely fooled him.

-- Louis Menand, "Sloppy Joe," The New Yorker, Aug 3&10, 2020, p. 73.

This, too, sounds right in retrospect. I remember lamenting to myself many times that Wife would take anybody else's side before mine. What this meant was that if I disagreed with some random stranger -- or warned her against him -- she would use her sharp critical intelligence to scrutinize and tear apart everything I said, clause by clause; and then she would go piteously soft-hearted when it came to the other guy's side. This is what happened when I tried to warn her against paying Boyfriend 5's electric bill, which in the end she did anyway. When she got an email from someone claiming to be the only living relative of a little girl in Nigeria who needed money for a cancer operation, I had to threaten her to prevent her from sending money: I forget at this point if I threatened violence or divorce, but I remember it required me to assert levels of marital authority as Husband and Head of the goddamned Household that I never once actually believed in. It wasn't just yelling ... she was used to me yelling. I somehow (and after all the years I no longer remember quite how) had to make her afraid of me before she gave in. And I wondered for years ... why does she trust these obvious shysters so easily and never trust me? I never understood it.

But according to the remark in this article, maybe that's normal. I still don't really know.
      

On lying, part 10

Guild cleared his throat. "She told us about finding this here chain and knife on the floor where the Wolf dame had most likely broke it off fighting with Wynant, and she told us the reasons why she'd hid it till now. Between me and you, that don't make any too much sense, looking at it reasonably, but maybe that ain't the way to look at it in this case. To tell you the plain truth, I don't know what to make of her in a lot of ways, I don't for a fact."

"The chief thing," I advised them, "Is not to let her tire you out. When you catch her in a lie, she admits it and gives you another lie to take its place and, when you catch her in that one, admits it and gives you still another, and so on. Most people -- even women -- get discouraged after you've caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on either the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying and you've got to be careful or you'll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you're tired of disbelieving her."

-- Detective Guild and Nick Charles, in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, chapter 25, pp.123-124 

It has been years now, but when I read these lines yesterday it felt exactly like life with Wife. Probably I'm overdramatizing, or giving her too much credit. If I think about it, I recollect that I could often (usually? or maybe only sometimes?) tell when she was lying, and if I felt like I had to I could sometimes break her down to what appeared to be the truth. So maybe she wasn't really a Mimi Jorgenson. But dear God it was tiring.
    

Celebrity gossip can be terrifying

A couple of months ago I was scrolling through Twitter and I saw a post by Chris Ryan about Woody Allen, who has lived under the shadow of child sexual abuse accusations since 1992 (almost 30 years as of this writing). This was never a case that I was terribly interested in, but I knew in a general way that Allen had been long ago convicted of Doing Bad Shit in the court of public opinion. So I was a little surprised by what Ryan said.

Then a couple of days later he posted a link to a blog post by Moses Farrow which discussed the whole sordid story in detail and rejected all of it.

Moses Farrow's blog is here. 

Why do I call it "terrifying"? Because for years I lived in fear of Wife making exactly the same kinds of accusations against me, and in fear of her getting away with it. Maybe I had a warped notion of how the legal system worked, but it was not until I finally got my own attorney that I could even imagine that the Court might not automatically take Wife's word against mine, or that reason and evidence might stand a chance against her self-proclaimed identity as a Woman Abused. I don't know where I picked up these ideas: maybe from the Internet, maybe from listening to my father's troglodytic opinions on sexual politics, maybe just from my own generic insecurities. No idea, really. But this is part of why I wanted us to stay out of Court when we separated, even though by then I was a lot more confident in my ability to survive the process.

At one point Wife did tell her pastor and a teacher at the boys' elementary school that she thought I was too violent with them. The case got referred to a local Social Services office (I don't remember the exact department name after all these years), so that she and I had to make an appointment to go sit in someone's office and explain What Really Happened. She had based the whole story on some event that really had taken place a few days ago, though she had twisted elements of it to make it sound far worse than it really was. I described what happened, she didn't contradict me, and the official dismissed the whole event with a vague irritation as clearly not having been worth the time and effort. 
 
I don't know if she was trying to play some kind of three-dimensional chess by getting my name on a record somewhere so that she could use it against me later? Or maybe she didn't even know why she did it? Honestly I don't know. If she had really believed the children were at risk, surely she would have made some objections when I described what really happened in a way that exposed how small a molehill this really was. Wouldn't she?

I also remember that one time when the boys were playing with her very rambunctiously she got a bruise on her stomach from one of them careening headlong into her. She took a Polaroid photo of the bruise right away and kept it in her dresser. Whenever I asked why she gave an answer that told me nothing. I always assumed she was going to claim I had hit her and that she had the photo as proof.  

In any event it seems like she stopped trying to build this kind of a case against me after the night she was arrested. That whole business cost us lots of money, but if it made her decide there was no point in trying to make me look bad, I suppose that was an unexpected benefit. 

I've wandered a long way from talking about Woody Allen. As I say, I was never very focused on the story in the first place. But reading Moses Previn's blog was terrifying in retrospect, for much the same reason that I found "Gone Girl" so scary. And I guess I'm grateful that Wife never actually did any of those things to me in real life. For whatever reason ....
         

Blast from the past: Trying to cut a deal with Wife

[Here is something else I found in the old files on my computer. The document that I reprint here is dated September 23, 2003.]

Back in 2003 and 2004 I was out of work for a year and a half. Oh, I spent plenty of time every day looking for work. I must have clicked "send" on 800 applications, and I had lots of interviews. But one way or another it just took a really long time for the penny to drop. (Wife had stopped working and gone out on permanent disability because of her lupus just a few years before.)

During that same time, Wife had been church-shopping, and she had found a Baptist church that appealed to her. So she started attending it regularly, and kept asking me and the boys to come along ... not for the sake of our souls, but because she felt that it reflected badly on her to attend a church but not have her family with her. (This reason sounded crazy to me at the time, but I did not yet know the word narcissism.)

Somewhere along the line she told somebody in her small group about the trouble I was having finding a job, and also about how she couldn't persuade me to join her. They told her, Ask him what he needs from you. It's your job as his wife to support him through this trial, so get him to write out a list of what he needs from you: retyping his resume, making dinner, doing the laundry ... whatever it is. Then make sure you do everything on the list as well as you possibly can. And then you can ask him to join you at church in return.

So she asked. I thought about it for a while, and this is what I came back with. You can see from this that getting my resume retyped or dinner made was not exactly where I thought the problem was. 
____________________

What I want from you

High priority

Right now, I am told by everyone that my highest priority needs to be finding a new job. (Everyone except M---, who says I should also spend 2 hours a day writing; and somewhere in there I should also exercise.) But I often feel like my real job is negotiating major emotional upheavals between us. This can take hours a day, and it leaves me in no frame of mind to hunt for work. The best way to support my job hunt is therefore not to make my PowerPoint slides for me, but to lift this particular burden from my shoulders.

1. Be a walking example of a Christian:

• Let the love of Christ keep you happy, even – no, especially – when you don’t get what you want.
• Let God handle vengeance in his own time and his own way – therefore do not harbor grudges.
• When life dumps mountains on you – and it’ll happen! – rely on God’s infinite power and love to turn them into molehills.
• Trust in God, even when what he is doing is very bizarre.
• If Christ is with you, then the bastards can’t grind you down – so be not afraid that they might.
• Whatever happens to you – and sometimes it is pretty bad and horribly unfair – remember that Christ knows exactly how you feel and is suffering there with you. He too suffered from injustice, and his divine power could have left Golgotha a crater like Sodom and Gomorrah. But he didn’t. Let his friendship and en­courage­ment help you bear the troubles with a good heart.

2. Hold to the Truth as to life itself.

• When we get into big arguments (which I hope will be a lot rarer), you tell me about things I allegedly said and did that bear little or no relationship to anything I remember.
• Sometimes you can even quote whole conversations back to me that never happened, and I will be able to tell that the conversation grew out of one or two words that I did utter but that meant something totally different in context.
• When this happens I become truly frightened.
• I don’t know if this ever happens when you talk to others about things, and it may be out of your power to do anything about this; but so far as you can please try to hold fast to what really happened instead of allowing your memory to embellish it to what “should have happened”.

Low priority

(There are probably a bunch of these and – like any husband –I could probably keep adding to them if I took the time. But they are not central. If you can tackle them, great. If not, OK fine. I have not bothered trying to choose only the important ones because these are all lower priority.)

1. Remember that just because I yell about something doesn’t make it important. 

2. Eat foods that are good for you, at times that are good for you.

3. Don’t let yourself be helpless unless through illness you really can’t avoid it. (This means don’t let yourself be a victim of other people’s thought­less­ness, even if it is mine. For example, buy fruit if you need fruit and I haven’t gotten around to it. It doesn’t mean “Don’t rage against victimization,” because that is already covered under high-priority item #1 above.)

4. Do what you can to keep the kids occupied while I am job hunting. (You really already do this to a very large extent, so I’m not asking for any change here; I just need to mention it for the sake of completeness.)

5. More sex would be nice. (smile)

6. Let’s make dates to go to the gym a couple of times a week, regularly.

  

There will doubtless be other things I might want to ask until the Millennium comes and we are all made perfect …. 

What I will offer in exchange

1. I will go to church with you every Sunday. Not till Christmas. Not till Easter. I will go to church with you every Sunday as long as you carry out item #1 on the “high priority” list in the other column – because as long as you can carry that out successfully, it proves to me that Christianity is not a fraud. If God’s infinite power can’t help you to accomplish item #1, then Christianity is a fraud and it’s not worth my time to play along. [I'm not sure this actually follows, but it is the reason I gave her at the time.] If you do your best but stumble because we are all fallible … let’s discuss it on a case-by-case basis.

2. Ditto with sending the children to Sunday School, for exactly the same reasons. Same caveat.

3. When I yell, I will commit to getting over it right away, and to apologizing to the person I yelled to.

4. If you need to eat while I’m fixing another meal, I will not complain providing you eat foods that are good for you.

5. I will commit to exercising a minimum of twice a week, and try for a third time, whether or not you choose to join me.

6. I will drop the issue of Boyfriend 2 once and for all, permanently. (Notwithstanding this, I’d like to know who we get to do the repairs around our house or hear the kind of gossip I might hear about our other friends … if you feel inclined to share such gossip and not otherwise.)

There will doubtless be other things you would like to ask of me until the Millennium comes and we are all made perfect …. 

____________________

Her friends at church thought this was a wonderful offer on my part, and a great opportunity to rope me in. In the end she wasn't all that successful at being Christlike, but I guess it was worth a try ....
   

"Gone Girl"

This evening I went to the movies and saw "Gone Girl".  It's terrifying.

Not like zombie movies are terrifying.  Not like horror movies are terrifying.

But for someone like me who has had a troubled marital history … well, like I said.

I don't want to give away the plot twists and turns, in case you haven't seen it yet.  Maybe this whole post should be marked …

***SPOILER ALERT***

All I want to say is that I'm glad the movie wasn't made till now.  If I had seen it during the year-and-a-half when I was unemployed … or during the years after that when we were still going to church because Wife insisted on keeping up such-and-such a public image … or during any of the time that she had a deep crush on Church Tenor … or to put it generally, if I had seen this movie any time between 2003 and about the time I started this blog (end of 2007, or for practical purposes 2008), I would have shit my pants with fright. 

Wife has always cared – deeply, deeply – about how people see her.  About how she looks.  But during those years she was also regularly undermining how I looked – systematically, or so it seemed at the time.  She spread rumors at school and at church about how afraid she was of my "violent temper".  At one point one of the kids was playing rambunctiously with her and bruised her … and immediately she grabbed the Polaroid and took a photo of the bruise, then hid the photo in her lingerie drawer. 

(Of course I found it because I usually did the laundry, so as soon as I put away her panties one weekend I saw it there. She was trying to undermine how people saw me, but at the same time she was perfectly willing to let me do the work around the house, sort out her medications, and so forth. It never occurred to her that I might find the photo of her bruise, or accidentally mix up her medicines in a lethal way, or anything … and so she swallowed unhesitatingly any collection of pills that I gave her. On the other hand, clearly she was right to do so: she's still alive, after all, so you can tell I never took advantage of the opportunities she left in my path. You could say she was careless, or you could say she knew I wouldn't do anything to her because I'm too damned chicken. But I digress.)

Anyway, I think in the end she was never systematic enough – not careful enough, maybe not even smart enough – to have laid a really, truly foolproof trap to frame me for anything truly serious.  But that's only a retrospective judgement.  At the time I certainly thought she was, and I feared her.  I feared that she would call the cops one day – over nothing – and that I would never see the boys again. 

It was a tremendous relief to me the night she was arrested for felony spousal abuse.  Counselor said as much in our next session, actually … that it really seemed like I was relieved.  Of course she got off (because I co-operated to get her off).  But I knew it was a matter of public record, at that point.  I began – slowly, all too slowly – to be less afraid that she could manipulate events to make a violent lie about me seem the truth.

I'm not so afraid of her any more, because the boys are out of her house and so am I; because even though we haven't actually concluded the damned separation paperwork yet, there's less she can do to me.  She probably can't send me to jail any more, nor prevent me from seeing the boys.  Life is better.

But there was a while there – years – that I was really scared … partly because of what she could make people think, and partly because I was sharing a bed with a crazy woman.  (Think also of "Basic Instinct". Good think she always took heavy doses of sleeping pills.)  Every single day I had to pray that my golden tongue could smooth over whatever chaos she brewed up, and could keep me safe until bedtime.  Every day I had to hope that I could – as Ben Affleck's character says – "reach just one [woman]."  Namely her.  Say what she wanted to hear, so that I could keep the peace one more day.

It was an exciting time, no doubt about it.  Read some of my early posts about the excitement inherent in being involved with a "high-maintenance woman" and you'll get  a sense of what I mean.

But dear God, I'm glad I'm not there now.  I almost understand why Affleck's character makes the choices he does, but I'm glad I no longer have to make those choices.

It's late and I'm drunk.  It's time for bed.

And it's a scary, scary movie.  I'm glad it never turned out to be my life, but there were years when I really wasn't so sure.

On lying, part 9 concluded (I guess)

After my last installment, I suppose I should wind up. Friday afternoon came and went. I drove Son 2 home from school. He didn't say anything, and in fact put his seat back and pretended to be asleep the whole ride. But I saw that his eyes were open. He was just waiting for what I might say. I had no idea what to say, really, so I didn't. I patted him on the shoulder, and when we got home I told him I love him.

D thinks that sending him to boarding school is still the right thing to do. Or well, ... actually I can't quite tell what D thinks because she is using way too many words to express it. But I think that's what she said. She thinks that the few times Son 2 lies, it's because he feels overwhelmed or out of his depth, unable to measure up to some standard he thinks he is supposed to meet but can't. I don't know ... it sounds logical but I have a little trouble grabbing hold of it to do anything useful with the idea. She also thinks I was a damned fool for asking Son 2 if he sees Wife or me lying and cheating, because D is convinced that Son 2 sees pretty much everything. Maybe she's right.

She also said lots of other things that really irritated me and aren't at all germane to the current topic, so I won't bother quoting either of her two e-mails on the subject.

This is the way our crisis ends, not with a bang but a whimper. (with apologies to T. S. Eliot.)

On lying, part 9 cont'd: the next morning

So the next morning – after all this – I tried to talk to Son 2 as I drove him to school.

Hosea: What does it feel like when you lie or cheat?

Son 2: [silence]

Hosea: Seriously, what does it feel like? Is it good, like ‘Hey, I got what I wanted?’ I mean, if you get away with it …?

Son 2: [after a long silence] Well obviously it doesn’t feel good.

Hosea: Do you mean that it feels "Meh" – bland, indifferent – or that it feels bad?

Son 2: It feels bad.

Hosea: Then why do you do it? I mean, dropping a heavy weight on your toes feels bad, so you don’t do it. Stabbing yourself feels bad, so you don’t do it. Eating chocolate feels good (or tastes good) so you do do it. I get that. But why do something that feels bad?

It was a slow and fairly unsuccessful conversation. He challenged why I should be “interrogating” him, but of course I explained that it’s part of my job as his dad … also that I’m genuinely afraid (as a fellow human being who has to share the planet with him) where this could end up. He explained that he did it because he was “so far behind” in the game – at the time his score was neck-and-neck with Wife’s – and I had to ask, So what? Who cares? It’s only Scrabble, for Pete’s sake! Is trading away your integrity worth that? I admitted that I could think of one or two occasions when it is appropriate to trade away your integrity: for example, if the Gestapo is pounding on your door asking if there are any Jews hiding in the attic, you should say No even if there are. But if the stakes are less than that? If all you stand to lose is a game … or money … or that kind of thing? Those things are trash, they’re a joke, they can’t be taken seriously. Trading your integrity for something like that is a losing proposition any way you look at it.

As an aside: At this point I expect my readers to cock a quizzical (or critical)
eye at me. Just how transparent do I want to pretend we should all
be? Am I even paying attention to what I am saying? Yes, of course I
am aware that my own personal behavior doesn't exactly match what I am telling
Son 2 in the easiest and most obvious way. If you want to be charitable,
you can call my fuller thoughts on the subject "nuanced" or "layered"; another way to describe them might be "self-serving and hypocritical." And actually, I'll get
there in a minute, ... sort of. Let me go on.

He disagreed with my putting money on the list, but I was firm that it belonged there. Beyond a certain threshold level, more money does not mean more happiness; and when you die, as the saying goes, you can’t take it with you. (Whereas I think there is at least a possibility that you can take with you the virtues of a life well-lived. But that’s another conversation.)

I asked him, Do you see us – Wife and me – cheating at things and getting away with it? In other words, I asked him, am I saying one thing and doing another? If yes, then of course my actions – our actions (including Wife's) – speak louder than any words. And if you think I’m being a hypocrite, I added, go ahead and tell me: I won’t punish you for it. Feel free to let me know. Of course this was a dangerous gambit. I don’t know how much he knows about me and D; I suspect he knows a lot more than he’ll ever tell about Wife and her love life. But if that’s the case, I wanted him to say so. If he thought I was being a hypocrite – or blind – let him throw it in my face and I’d deal with it. Better to know exactly how I am setting a bad example (or she is) and answer the charge straight up and honestly than to have him write off everything I’m trying to say here as just words. And while I didn’t know what I would say, I was prepared for the possibility that he might bring up any of the places where either Wife or I have failed to be perfectly transparent. But it was that important.

He didn’t. He finally weasel-worded a statement that he couldn’t speak for what we would do in the future but he wasn’t seeing us cheat today and get away with it. I don’t know if he meant that (so that the weasel-wording was intended to palliate the shame the admission could have caused him) or if that too was a lie (in which case the weasel-wording would have been meant to make it not-quite-so-much of a lie). But that’s what he said. And I did ask him, … why should we send him to boarding school, if this is the kind of person he is choosing to grow into? (I emphasized that he has the possibility to choose differently today, but that it will be a lot harder to choose differently 20 or 30 years from now. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.)

And he told me he didn’t have an answer for me right now. He wanted to think about it. I asked him to get back to me no later than the drive home tomorrow (Friday), because I know that without a deadline the words “I’ll get back to you” can easily morph into “Never.” I don’t know whether he will have anything to say, or what it will be. And I don’t know what we are going to do about boarding school. By the time I dropped him off at school, I was very troubled.

On lying, part 9: cheating at Scrabble?

It's late. I'm tired. This isn't going to be all thought out or even terribly coherent, probably. But I want to get something on paper (er ... into electrons) tonight while it is fresh.

Wife's birthday. Ironically it was her week to make dinner. Nice dinner, cake afterwards, and then "How about we do something fun together instead of just playing computer games or going to bed? How about Scrabble?"

We get it all out, set up, I go first. We've gone around three or four times, and Son 2 gets a shockingly good score by playing on a triple-word score, but his word includes a blank tile. Wife has already played a blank tile. And I see in my tray that I have a blank tile. But a Scrabble set comes with only two blank tiles. As Maxwell Smart once said when he and the bad guy both turned over aces of spades at the same time, "Either this is a pinochle deck, or one of us is cheating."

It was Son 2. That "blank tile" was really an "L" played face down. We packed in the game. Son 2 brushed his teeth and went to bed. Wife went to bed. Honestly I'll go to bed pretty soon.

But shit! Where did he learn to cheat like that? (A second issue is, Who the hell cheats at Scrabble, of all things? But that's putting the indignation on the wrong point.) It's not the first time, either. I've caught him lying ... not often, but it's happened. His perfect mimicry of emotional affect, which is to say his gift for emotional simulation, makes him a master at emotional dissimulation and manipulation. He can make you believe that he is anyone, and that he is feeling anything. It is scary.

And I start wondering, ... why are we planning to send him to private school next year? OK sure, part of it is to get him out of the way so Wife and I can split up. Part of it, as he told one school in his interview (when the headmaster asked him point-blank if boarding school was his idea or if his parents were just trying to get rid of him), is that, in his words, "I want to escape." Right, got that. And I'd like to help him. And part of it is that I truly believe high school is the time when your heart is most trainable, the time when it is most susceptible to being oriented towards the highest and the best, the time when moral education is most critical. Sure, it's important to train your mind too, but that continues on into university. The thing is, if you aren't a gentleman by the time you enter university, you won't be when you leave either. High school makes gentlemen -- I mean the word in an ethical and gender-neutral sense -- or else cads, scoundrels, or easy-going unresisting mediocrities. And truly, that's the most important part of education, isn't it? If your heart is right, if your character is sound, if you can rely on a well-earned self-respect, then there's always more time later to train your mind more and more. But if your heart is wrong and your character is unsound ... why bother? Honestly then it's better if your mind remains untrained, because I'd rather that the thieves and swindlers in society be too dumb to get away with it.

So what about Son 2? I've seen him lie before, I've seen him manipulate people emotionally, and while I've told him it's wrong I've also told myself afterwards to let it go rather than to obsess about it. I've tried to think of suitable punishments, and sometimes I've succeeded, but maybe all he has learned is that it is wrong to get caught. I can't tell. But someone who will lie about little things, will lie about big ones. I learned that by living with Wife and realizing that I knew all her crazy lying and cheating was there from the beginning. Someone who will cheat at little things, will cheat at big ones. There is no way it will ever just be about Scrabble.

Boarding school ain't cheap, and it's not really clear we can afford it in the first place. If I thought he would walk out a gentleman after four years, though, it would be worth it. But if the battle is already lost and he'll walk out a clever, manipulative liar and cheat -- only better trained and more subtle than he is today -- then what the hell is the point? In that case why even send him? In that case why even fight Wife for custody? Why should I care? Maybe I should just escape, and to hell with them both!

That can't be right. A life spent manipulating others is a life where you can never relate to them as human beings, which means it is a life of profound loneliness. It's a bad life even for the manipulator, to say nothing of the damage he does to others. I love my sons, and I would never want that for either of them. Besides, my job as a father has to be to hang in there.

But something like this really makes me wonder ....

Like mother, like daughter?

D wrote me recently that she is disturbed by news she got from her daughter. Brittany and her boyfriend were driving through Texas visiting his relatives, when their car broke down. Apparently they can't fix it, and so they have decided to sell the car ... without telling the buyer about the problems. D goes on to say, ...

I realize being up front about the car's problems requires her to eat the cost of the auto, but basic ethics doesn't leave much wiggle room. If "Do unto to others as you would have them do unto you" is the basis of ethical decision making for all religious people, and is also accepted by secularists, what she is doing is not admirable. I told her so...and she sees the issue clearly, but she feels she can't afford the loss of so much money.... Honestly, what is the point of reading great literature and philosophy if it doesn't make you a better person? I may read weekly magazines and even indulge in the NYRB and The New Yorker, all frivolous wastes of time according to Brittany (I hear about this every time she visits), but I stubbornly believe that what she is doing is wrong despite my low brow reading material. Well...what can I do except love her dearly and vocally, and set another example? Not much.

I'm not quite sure what to say about this, so I haven't said anything. My last letter back to her picked up other topics entirely and was silent on this one. But it's not that nothing comes to mind ... only that I don't think any of it is something D wants to hear.

"Set another example?" Sure. That would be great. Where would you start? Maybe with the time that Brittany was travelling in eastern Europe and stole a volume of philosophy from somebody that she stayed with, just because the book was plainly over the head of its owner? Because he would never begin to understand what it was saying, while she could? And you laughed. You thought it was funny.

Or we could talk about the time early in our relationship when I was disturbed about Son 2 lying to me, and you brushed my concerns away dismissively by saying, "Hosea, everybody lies." You thought it was interesting to look at why and when people lie, but took the lying itself for granted ... like some law of nature.

Gosh, I remember a time back some twenty years ago, when you were still friends with Wife and Brittany was still a little girl. One evening you were visiting Wife and me, and you told us with real amusement about something Brittany had done a few days before, sneaking around behind your back so she could do something you had forbidden to her. I forget the details. You had punished her, partly for the original offense and partly for sneaking about it. And Brittany threw a fit, yelling at you that it was so unfair for you to punish her for being sneaky when you yourself were the sneakiest person she knew! You chuckled while telling us this story, and remarked with a little self-deprecating humor that of course she was right. She must have been all of six years old at that point, and already she knew you so well.

You tell me, D, where do you want to start? Children learn what they live. We reap what we sow.

I still love you madly, now and ever. Don't get me wrong, and never doubt it. But don't think I can't see.

Dorophobia, part 4

When I heard back from D (after my letter here), I found that I had completely misunderstood her: certainly her motives or intentions, and also what she expected of me. Here is what she said. The second and third paragraphs are absolutely critical in this regard:

Dearest Hosea,

If you tell me not to buy your presents, I won't. I respect your judgment, and I don't have to understand or agree with your reasoning. You are an adult and can decide what makes you happy or what doesn't please you and have that honored. I will do so, and stop giving you gifts.

That said, I never, ever expected you to give the books as a gift from me. I expected you, and still would like you to simply use the books for how they were mean to be used; to be read and enjoyed as a family. How you learned about these books is immaterial and can easily be explained without any reference to me. I certainly realize you could never tell Wife that I wish her well, although I do, but playing music that she might enjoy [this was D’s gift for Wife] did not seem out of line. She does not need to know that I discovered the music. Personal recognition does not matter. What matters is a richer existence than we might discover on our own.

It seems like the real issue here isn't about presents, for gift giving is honorable and has a long history. What strikes me is your lack of imagination. Returning the books to Amazon is the last thing I desire; if you don't want them or don't feel comfortable with them, simply give them to Hogwarts, or pass the CD to an organization that provides music for the less fortunate, or send the entire lot to http://www.firstbook.org/. Why did this never occur to you?

It is ridiculous to ask me not to be hurt. Of course I'm hurt and dismayed, because no relationship should be without the possibility of gifts. Gift giving can be just a social convention, but on a much more important level, it is fundamental. Our existence is a gift, and many good things, including our relationships with one another, are freely given and cannot be mandated, or made simple matters of "duty and responsibility". God himself transcends his own law and covenant in the Incarnation, a gift of Himself as fully human to us. In His example, we find the courage to give each other the gifts of love, presence, and connection. At times, that means accepting tangible gifts with grace and imagination; at times the gifts are more intangible. Yet, I worry about someone who cannot accept material possessions and use them in creative ways, not because the gifts themselves are particularly valuable, but because they represent something that cannot be easily expressed. The wise men -- note they were called wise -- gave gifts as symbols of what they understood to be the various dimensions of salvation offered to the world by the child they sought to honor. Jesus himself honored gift-giving when he accepted the gift of costly perfume poured over his feet; he recognized the woman weeping while she washed his feet, understood he was soon to die. Oddly, the names of the kings, even their number, have been lost, and despite Jesus' promise, we don't remember the identity of the woman who bought the perfume. Yet we remember the gifts. Gifts are precious because they can present, or re-present, something about the recipient that should be respected and honored, and in doing so, they bind us together. That you are not yet able to accept gifts is most unfortunate.

You are quite mistaken about being alone. You sometimes see yourself as an island, misunderstood and invisible. But "no man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main..." and we share this understanding in a myriad of ways. If you cannot accept gifts now, it does not mean that you will be unable to do so in the future. I will wait for that time, and I will rejoice when it comes. For now, simply donate the books, and out of respect for my gift, send me the details.

I always love you.

--D

Busy girl

And all this time I somehow thought Wife was just sitting back, staring at the walls and moping!

You all know Wife has an account on OKCupid, and that she was seeing Pop for a while. I also knew that she had struck up correspondences with a number of other men on the site. What I didn't know was that she was fucking two of them! Better than that ... she is fucking one of them (do I call him Boyfriend 6?) while she coos to him about wanting permanence and about how his warm body against hers has done wonders for her depression; and then at the same time she is "cheating" on him (her word, not mine) with another one (Boyfriend 7?) who knows about Boyfriend 6 but not vice versa. Wife tells Boyfriend 7 to be very careful that Boyfriend 6 not find out about them, because she doesn't want to spoil the potential for a permanent relationship with him.

I'm not sure I'll be able to keep these two straight with mere numbers, so maybe I had better give them names as well: I'll call Boyfriend 6 "Kevin" (which is close enough) and Boyfriend 7 "Jenner" (ditto). Then there's Al, with whom she appears (so far) to be "just good friends": they get together every so often to go walking.

Apparently Son 2 knows about these guys, or at any rate knows that they are friends of Wife. (I'm not sure she has let on that she is fucking both of them -- one behind the other's back, no less! -- but knowing how poor Wife's boundary control is, I can't be sure she didn't.) Last weekend Kevin (B6) gave Wife a whole bunch of food, which she explained away to me by saying that her friend Leia's mom is getting senile and buying food she doesn't need so she helped Leia clean out her mom's refrigerator. Come to think of it, Wife repeated that story to Son 2, while complaining to him that I didn't believe her. (That's not at all what I had said, but she has a hard time listening.) So I guess she is not totally transparent with Son 2 either -- and thank God for small favors! Meanwhile a few days ago she was still trying to meet up with Pop for breakfast, but apparently he promised he'd be available on a certain day and then skipped town.

This must explain why she was suddenly motivated to vacuum the house yesterday, after years of neglect: one of the two of them must have been coming over, and she wanted the place to look nice. It explains why she is always so careful to make the bed ... because she has been using it during the day, and has probably washed the sheets on top of it. My God, it has been years since she showed that much initiative or energy! There must be something to the idea that all them endorphins kicking around in your brain can make you do all kinds of unexpected things.

The only thing I kind of wonder is why she has bothered to hide it from me? Why should she care what I think, any more? Am I going to do anything about it? Well, in cold honesty I no longer care where she shops her body around as long as she doesn't interfere with the rest of us. Son 2 is in eighth grade, which means that next September he will almost certainly be out of the house at boarding school somewhere; and at that time, we'll just dissolve the marriage. There will be no more reason to stick together. And if I have stuck it out this long, there's no real reason not to stick it out just a little bit longer.

Now how do I break the news to D, that Wife is getting more sex than she (D) is? That's not going to go over at all well ...! I suppose I can try to console her that at any rate Wife's not getting me, but I don't know how much comfort she will find that. I don't know. But I do think it is remarkable that Wife can still conceal that much of what she does, after all these years when I thought I had learned to read her pretty well.

What a busy, busy girl ...!

Peanut allergy

Several years ago, Wife took Son 1 for allergy testing and then declared that he was allergic to peanuts. She made a great big deal of this, warning my parents, all other family members, the school … everybody within shouting distance … that he had to avoid peanuts because he was so dreadfully allergic to them that the could kill him. At the time my father responded with puzzlement, noting that he had given both boys peanut butter sandwiches for years with no ill effects. I just shrugged and stayed out of it; traditionally Wife has been responsible for all the medical decisions in our house.

But I did wonder about it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking about Münchausen syndrome by proxy. So just before his most recent testing last year, I told her that I had read somewhere that “childhood allergies often disappear over time all by themselves” (I hadn’t read any such thing, but there was method behind my fabricating it) and that I was going to want a copy of the report if Son 1 were still allergic to anything. She came back (exactly as I had imagined she would) announcing that yes indeed, all of Son 1’s allergies had cleared themselves up. Needless to add, she did not bring along a copy of the report.

But this did not satisfy my curiosity completely. Now I wanted to see the other reports. Had Son 1 ever been allergic to peanuts, or had she made up the whole thing? It took me a long time to get around to it, but I finally contacted the medical clinic and asked them to send me copies of all Son 1’s allergy tests ever. Naturally I asked them to mail me the results at work, not at home. And they arrived yesterday.

The results were not quite what I had imagined, but they were interesting all the same. There were four tests: one from 2000, one from 2005, one from 2010, and one without a date. Of those four tests, three of them showed no reaction to anything except the histamine control. Those three were 2000, 2010 [the recent one that I mentioned above], and the undated one. The test from 2005 did show allergies … and that date sounds right because it fit the age Son 1 would have been at the time. But what they showed was exactly the same level of response for peanuts, oranges [not that Wife ever had us stop feeding him oranges!], four or five different trees and grasses -- and also pure histamine. All of those irritants were scored exactly the same. Now, a little common sense tells you there has to be something wrong with the test. For an irritant to score the same as pure histamine should indeed mean (if true) that the patient had better stay away from it. If true, that state of affairs really could be cause for alarm. But if he had been that allergic to oranges, we would have seen him swell up after eating an orange or drinking orange juice. If he had been that allergic to half a dozen common trees and grasses, he would have swelled up every time the wind picked up during pollen season. And he never did any of those things. So why did the test come out that way? I have no idea, but maybe he was sick the day of the test or something like that. Certainly with results that fly so far in the face of common sense it would have been worth it to retest again in a little while – maybe a month, maybe six months, I don’t know, but something a lot more immediate than five years! And I also have to wonder, … why pick on peanuts? Why tell Son 1 that peanuts would kill him? All I can assume is that making it all a story about peanuts allowed her a measure of control: it made the story tidy and manageable, and it allowed her to indulge all her overprotective mother fantasies by bellowing at the world about how they have to be careful because otherwise a simple mistake could kill Her Son.

It’s kind of crazy.

I should tell Son 1 at some point, but I’m not sure if I should do it now or if there is any reason to wait. Heck, I should tell everybody I know that the whole exercise was a false alarm. But I know that I am not thinking clearly on this point, because I know that part of my motivation is a rather base desire to embarrass Wife and that is clouding my ability to see the whole picture. So I’d like a sanity-check from any of you. How do I communicate this?